Panetta Is Chosen as C.I.A. Chief, in a Surprise Step

WASHINGTON — Leon E. Panetta, a former congressman and White House chief of staff, has been selected by President-elect Barack Obama to head the Central Intelligence Agency. The choice, disclosed Monday by Democratic officials, immediately revealed divisions in the party as two senior lawmakers questioned why Mr. Obama would nominate a candidate with limited experience in intelligence matters.

The job was the last unfilled major post for Mr. Obama, who has criticized the agency for using interrogation methods he characterized as torture. Democratic officials said Mr. Obama had selected Mr. Panetta for his managerial skills, his bipartisan standing, and the foreign policy and budget experience he gained under President Bill Clinton.

Mr. Panetta has himself been a sharp critic of the agency’s interrogation practices. Some Democrats expressed strong support for the choice, with Harry Reid of Nevada, the Senate majority leader, describing him as “one of the finest public servants I have ever served with and dealt with since he left the White House.”

But Mr. Panetta, 70, was also widely described as a surprising and unusual choice to head the C.I.A., an agency that has been notoriously unwelcoming to previous directors perceived as outsiders.

Among the lawmakers who expressed skepticism about the choice was Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and the new chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Ms. Feinstein, who would oversee any confirmation hearing for Mr. Panetta, issued a statement that signaled clear disapproval and said she had not been notified about the choice.

“My position has consistently been that I believe the agency is best served by having an intelligence professional in charge at this time,” she said.

A second top Democrat, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the departing chairman of the Intelligence Committee, shares Ms. Feinstein’s concerns, Democratic Congressional aides said.

Ms. Feinstein’s Republican counterpart on the Intelligence Committee, Senator Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, said he would be “looking hard at Panetta’s intelligence expertise and qualifications.”

It was not clear whether the skepticism would become an obstacle to the nomination of Mr. Panetta, who would succeed Michael V. Hayden, a retired Air Force general with decades of intelligence experience.

Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who is a member of the Intelligence Committee, called Mr. Panetta a “strong choice” who “has the skills to usher in a new era of accountability at the nation’s premier intelligence agency.”

The choice of Mr. Panetta comes nearly two weeks after Mr. Obama had otherwise wrapped up his major personnel moves. It appears to reflect the difficulty Mr. Obama has encountered in finding a candidate who is capable of taking charge of the agency but is not tied to the interrogation and detention program run by the C.I.A. under President Bush.

Aides have said that Mr. Obama had originally hoped to select a C.I.A. director with extensive field experience, especially in combating terrorist networks. But his first choice for the job, John O. Brennan, had to withdraw his name amid criticism over his alleged role in the formation of the agency’s detention and interrogation program after the Sept. 11 attacks.

As President Clinton’s chief of staff for two and a half years, Mr. Panetta regularly attended daily intelligence briefings in the Oval Office, and he has a reputation in Washington as a skilled manager and power broker with a strong background in budget issues. But he has little direct intelligence experience, and did not serve on the House Intelligence Committee during his 16 years in Congress.

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Leon E. Panetta was a member of the House of Representatives and White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton.Credit
Kevin Wolf/Associated Press

In disclosing the selection, Democratic officials said Mr. Panetta’s gravitas and ties to Mr. Obama would give the C.I.A. a powerful voice within the administration, particularly in bureaucratic jockeying with the Pentagon, which has a much bigger budget and more bureaucratic clout.

If confirmed by the Senate, Mr. Panetta would take control of the agency most directly responsible for hunting senior leaders of Al Qaeda around the world. He would also become the oldest director in the agency’s history, as well as the second politician and former lawmaker in recent years to take it over. Porter J. Goss, the former Republican congressman from Florida, ran the C.I.A from 2004 to 2006, though Mr. Goss was himself a former C.I.A. operative and the longtime chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

Among the outsiders who ran into trouble in the past after being installed as C.I.A. director were Stansfield M. Turner, a retired Navy admiral selected by President Jimmy Carter, and John M. Deutch, a physicist and former deputy defense secretary who was chosen by Mr. Clinton.

Mr. Deutch, now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said there would have been good reasons for Mr. Obama to select a C.I.A. veteran to lead the agency. But Mr. Deutch also cited the examples of John McCone in the Kennedy administration and George Bush in the Nixon administration as cases in which outsiders became “two of the agency’s most successful directors.”

Mr. Deutch said that Mr. Panetta and Dennis Blair, a retired admiral who has been selected by Mr. Obama to become director of national intelligence, were an “absolutely brilliant team.” He called Mr. Panetta a “talented and experienced manager of government and a widely respected person with Congress.”

An early test in Mr. Panetta’s tenure at the C.I.A. would be to determine the future of the agency’s detention and interrogation program.

“Those who support torture may believe that we can abuse captives in certain select circumstances and still be true to our values,” he wrote in The Washington Monthly last year. “But that is a false compromise.” He also wrote: “We cannot and we must not use torture under any circumstances. We are better than that.”

Some human rights groups praised the choice. Elisa Massimino, executive director of Human Rights First, said it was important that the new C.I.A. director be someone “who recognizes that torture is illegal, immoral, dangerous and counterproductive.”

But some intelligence experts called the selection underwhelming, given the important role the C.I.A. plays in disrupting terrorist attacks against the United States.

“It’s a puzzling choice and a high-risk choice,” said Amy Zegart, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has written extensively on intelligence matters.

“The best way to change intelligence policies from the Bush administration responsibly is to pick someone intimately familiar with them,” Ms. Zegart said. “This is intelligence, not tax or transportation policy. You can’t hit the ground running by reading briefing books and asking smart questions.”

As C.I.A. director, Mr. Panetta would report to Mr. Blair. Neither choice has yet been announced.

The C.I.A. has settled down from years of turmoil after the Sept. 11 attacks and fallout from flawed intelligence assessments about Iraq’s unconventional weapons programs. But the agency’s role among the constellation of spy agencies operating under the director of national intelligence remains ill-defined.

Mr. Panetta, a native of Monterey, Calif., served eight terms in the House before becoming the chief budget adviser to Mr. Clinton in 1993 and taking over as Mr. Clinton’s chief of staff from July 1994 to January 1997.

Lee H. Hamilton, the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group, of which Mr. Panetta was a member, said Mr. Panetta’s good relationship with Mr. Obama could translate into influence within the broader intelligence community.

Mr. Hamilton said Mr. Panetta could make up for a lack of direct intelligence experience by picking a strong group of aides at the agency.

“You have to look at the team,” he said. “You clearly will want intelligence professionals at the highest levels of the C.I.A.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: PANETTA CHOSEN AS CHIEF OF C.I.A. IN SURPRISE STEP. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe